Physicists have come up with a way to make secret codes based on the cosmic microwave background, the afterglow of the birth of the universe.
It will be a replay of the same catastrophic explosion astronomers first saw in November 2014.
Physicists will collide lead ions to replicate and study the embryonic universe.
11/24/15.
New York Times.
The Lisa Pathfinder will test equipment for an orbiting observatory that will peer into the universe’s darkest corners.
“The opportunity to be involved in such a project as a graduate student is an amazing opportunity,” said Anna Egner, who is leading the team’s effort to build a mock-up of the spectroscope for an actual payload package. “Having always been enchanted and intrigued by physics and astronomy, working on an instrument that might one day fly into space is awesomely exciting.”
The first commercial missions to nearby asteroids could launch as early as 2020, but it will be decades before asteroid mining begins in earnest. In the meantime, the new spectroscopic technology promises to provide planetary scientists with new details about the chemical composition of the asteroids, comets, moons and minor planets in the solar system: information that is certain to improve our understanding of how the solar system formed. In addition, it could become an important tool in the planetary defense arsenal because it can determine whether objects crossing Earth’s orbit are made from rock or ice.
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It may hurt your brain to think about it, but it appears that the answer is possibly to be yes, or at least the numbers are almost in the same ballpark.
Astrophysicists in fact set out to answer this question about a decade ago. It’s a complicated problem to solve, but it’s somewhat easier if you throw in a couple of qualifiers — that we are talking about stars in the observable universe; and grains of sand on the whole planet, not just the seashores.
The researchers started by calculating the luminosity density of a section of the cosmos — this is a calculation of how much light is in that space. They then utilized this calculation to guess the number of stars needed to make that amount of light. This was quite a mathematical challenge!
Continue reading “Are there More Stars in the Universe than Grains of Sand on Earth?” »
An artificial intelligence program received such high scores on a standardized test that it’d have an 80% chance of getting into a Japanese university.
The Wall Street Journal reports that the program, developed by Japan’s National Institute of Informatics, took a multi-subject college entrance exam and passed with an above-average score of 511 points out of a possible 950. (The national average is 416.) With scores like that, it has an 8 out of 10 chance of being admitted to 441 private institutions in Japan, and 33 national ones.
Continue reading “An AI Program in Japan Just Passed a College Entrance Exam” »
Where do we come from? There are many right answers to this question, and the one you get often depends on who you ask.
For example, an astrophysicist might say that the chemical components of our bodies were first forged in the nuclear fires of stars.
On the other hand, an evolutionary biologist might look at the similarities between our DNA and that of other primates’ and conclude we evolved from apes.
Astrophysicists have concluded the yet most precise search for the gravitational wave background created by supermassive black hole mergers. But the expected signal isn’t there.
Last month, Lawrence Krauss rumored that the newly updated gravitational wave detector LIGO had seen its first signal. The news spread quickly – and was shot down almost as quickly. The new detector still had to be calibrated, a member of the collaboration explained, and a week later it emerged that the signal was probably a test run.
